Free Garage Door Estimate Calculator

Add up your true direct costs — labor including burden, materials with markup, and job extras like equipment or disposal. Add a contingency for surprises if the job has any. That's your break-even, the floor you never quote below. Then add your profit on top: price = break-even × (1 + profit%). This calculator runs exactly that math as you type, and shows the result both ways — what you added on to your costs, and what share of the final price that leaves you — because the two numbers are easy to confuse and quoting on the wrong one is how a job loses money.

Burden is everything an hour of labor costs beyond the paycheck: payroll taxes (typically 8–10% of wages), workers' compensation (a few percent for low-risk trades, well over 15% for high-risk ones like roofing or concrete), liability insurance, and paid time off. All-in burden commonly lands between 15% and 40% on top of base pay — and forgetting it is one of the most common ways a profitable-looking job loses money. If you're solo and paying yourself, you can leave it at 0%.

Markup is a percentage added on top of your cost; margin is your share of the final price. Adding 100% on top — charging double your costs — is the same thing as a 50% margin. Quoting a markup when you mean a margin is one of the most common ways contractors underprice a job, so this calculator keeps it simple: you enter what you add on top — no cap — and it always shows what share of the final price that leaves you.

Work backward from your own numbers instead of copying competitors: add up what you want to earn in a year plus every cost of being in business, then divide by your realistic billable hours — most garage door techs bill far fewer hours than they work. That result is your floor. Local demand, licensing, and skill decide how far above it you can go.

Somewhere between 15% and 50% is common practice across the trades, and it isn't padding: the markup pays for sourcing time, supply runs, returns, warranty callbacks, and the money you float between buying materials and getting paid. If the customer supplies materials, price the labor accordingly — you still carry the workmanship risk.

What runs the clock is what you find behind the bracket. A cable job becomes sheet metal repair once the bottom bracket has torn out of the end stile, and a spring job stalls when someone before you fitted a mismatched drum or a spring wound the wrong way, so nothing on the truck fits the door.

Jambs rot at the bottom and header pads turn out to be thin plywood over nothing, and you are doing carpentry before you hang any steel. Headroom and obstructions never show in the photos a customer sends, and ductwork, a ceiling rack or a light fixture sitting in the track path all mean re-planning the install. A low-headroom or high-lift conversion is a different job from the one that was quoted.

Cold adds time, since a seal frozen to the slab has to be freed before the door will move at all, and a garage full of a customer's belongings has to be moved before a ladder goes anywhere. Then the supply house, where a discontinued section can be weeks out and a color match on an older door is often simply not available.

Springs and sections are not shelf goods. A torsion spring is sized to the door by wire size, inside diameter, length and wind, so truck stock is a spread of guesses and the wrong guess sends you back to the distributor mid-job.

Sections come from that distributor as well, usually a full door or a single panel on a lead time, and freight damage becomes yours the moment you sign for it, so open the crate on the truck. Steel moves, and manufacturers revise door and spring pricing on short notice, which is how an older written estimate goes stale on you.

The small hardware is what gets miscounted. Bottom seal and its retainer come in stock lengths, so a nine foot door leaves an offcut; hinges are numbered by position and the count follows section count and width; a four-section door takes ten rollers, not eight. Cable, drums and bearings are cheap and are the parts you least want to reuse, and openers are getting more brand-tied every year — a wall console, a rail extension or a battery backup is rarely interchangeable with the one you already carry.

Free and unlimited, no account needed. The math runs in your browser and your pricing setup saves only on your own device — we never see your numbers. Printing or sending the estimate it makes counts as a document: your first 2 are free, with no account.